MADISON HOBLEY
Tortured by Racist Police and Sentenced to Death by Lies

“I was raised in a pretty integrated neighborhood. Before taking me to that interrogation room, no one had ever called me a ‘nigger.’ I knew the odds about the black man, how easy he can end up in the penitentiary. I walked the straight path. I did all the things a person would do to avoid being in that situation. I went to school, had a job, settled down. But still, I’m taken into custody by these narrow-minded, evil, wicked men. We pay them to uphold the law, and these men looked me in the eye and told me that they hated me because of the color of my skin and that they didn’t care about the people who died in the fire, including my wife and child, that whoever set that fire did them a favor, because ‘nothing but niggers’ died.

“People ask me, ‘Are things back to normal?’ I don’t know what normal is. Take those sixteen years away, bring me my wife and child back, and give me back my name, the way I was—it will never be normal. I’ll never regain the life I had.”—Madison Hobley, convicted of seven counts of felony murder and aggravated arson and incarcerated for sixteen years, nearly thirteen of those years on death row. In January of 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan granted Hobley a full pardon based on innocence.1

The Crime

Tuesday, January 6, 1987, Chicago, Illinois

Located in the predominantly African American community of Avalon Park, on Chicago’s south side, the apartment building at 1121-23 East 82nd Street was tidy and well maintained.2 Less than a block away, however, on the other side of the viaduct, a neighborhood of a different character showed itself. Once a thriving business district, only a laundromat and two liquor stores remained on the thoroughfare known as “The Strip.” Drug dealers stood in front of condemned buildings openly plying their trade. Periodically an unmarked police car pulled up, the street vendor extended his hand through the open window, and then the officer continued on his way. Neighborhood residents assumed police were “on the take.”

Once inhabited mainly by upwardly mobile African Americans—doctors, lawyers, business owners, and other professional people—by the mid 1980s the character of the Avalon Park community was changing. The neighborhood had fallen to the purview of the urban gang the Black Gangsters. A rival gang, the Black Peastones, had branded the back of the 82nd Street apartment building with their insignia, marking it as their territory. The janitor sold drugs through the window of his first floor apartment.

At 2:00 a.m. on the morning of January 6, 1987, a fire was reported at the 82nd Street apartment complex. The three-story building had seven units on each floor and a garden-level basement apartment. With the interior front staircase engulfed in flames, the only exit from the building was via the exterior rear staircase for tenants on the upper floors. Two women on the second floor threw their children out the window into the arms of people on the ground. A tenant on the third floor climbed out her window and clung to the roof, finally dropping onto the windshield of a car. When firefighters arrived, they rescued some tenants with ladders and entered the building to drag both the living and the dead from the toxic blaze. Seven people perished, among them a seven-year-old girl and fifteen-month-old boy. The coroner listed the cause of death as acute carbon monoxide poisoning. Many more were seriously injured.

Chicago Police Officer Virgil Mikus, with the Bomb and Arson unit, arrived at the scene at 3:10 a.m. His initial report indicated the fire started in the front stairwell on the ground level and traveled up. Tests of charred debris revealed the presence of gasoline.

“My family is like the United Nations—Dominican all the way down to Dutch.”
Born in 1960 and raised in the middle class neighborhood of Chatham, the city of Chicago was the only home Madison Hobley knew before being sent to death row.3 His parents were both of  “mixed” race—Native American and Dutch on his mother’s side and African American and Dominican on his father’s. He jokes about having a cousin who could double for John Trivolta.

Madison’s mother worked as a nurse and his father was an engineer employed by the Chicago Housing Authority. Madison was the couple’s third child and first son. Devout Catholics, the family attended mass regularly. Madison went to Catholic school through his sophomore year in high school. He remembers the nuns’ “strict discipline, the rulers on the hands,” but also their praise, getting “stars for what we accomplished.” The school hosted the Officer Friendly Program, encouraging respect and trust for the police. A good student and an outstanding athlete, his first game in Pony League baseball, he pitched a no hitter. Being a left handed pitcher earned him the nickname “Lefty.” But Madison’s “first love” was football. He set his sights on a football scholarship at the University of Illinois or Colorado, until seriously injured during his sophomore year. After that his father urged him to pursue a career in baseball instead—“I moped a little, then pulled down all the football pictures, put up baseball pictures, and convinced myself that baseball was the sport.” During Christmas break of his senior year, he attended a baseball conference in Florida. Scouts for the Kansas City Royals and Atlanta Braves had their eye on him.

Madison invited a friend’s younger sister to his senior prom, a matchmaking arrangement by the friend; but when Madison learned he needed to formally ask the girl’s mother’s permission, he balked, “Forget it. I’m not asking her to marry me.” With the prom just days away, and unable to sell the tickets, on a whim Madison phoned a girl from a rival high school whom he had met briefly at school functions and when she was visiting a neighbor of Madison’s. Two years younger than him, Anita Johnson was cute and petite—short like him—and judging from what she had worn to the prom the year before, “she knew how to dress.” ‘Sure,’ Anita answered when Madison asked if she just might be interested in going to the prom, ‘What color are you wearing?’ They made a stunning couple, attired in beige and brown. Madison and Anita fell in love that night. They so much favored one another in appearance, people often mistook them for brother and sister…